Winner of the prestigious Prix Pictet in 2008 for his series The Chinese “Dust Bowl”, Montréal photographer Benoit Aquin has travelled the world for over 25 years, creating poignant images that bear witness to humanity’s often contentious relationship to the land.

The thirteen works from the Mégantic series, presented at Les Rencontres d’Arles as part of a Prix Pictet retrospective exhibition, reveal a wounded small town in eastern Québec devastated by the derailment and explosion of a freight train carrying crude oil in July 2013. Benoit Aquin surveyed the charred core of Lac-Mégantic in the months following the tragedy to take stock of the area’s destruction, but also of the life that tries to rebuild itself there.

He throws a harsh light on this environmental disaster, now emblematic of the neglectful management of Canada’s territories. At a time when oil industry lobbyists increase efforts to transform Québec into a new hub of trade in black gold, Benoit Aquin uncovers the human and environmental impact of political and economic ambitions in the frantic extraction of hydrocarbons, which in spite of recent events, is currently happening on a global scale. His work accompanies and supports citizen engagement that seeks to preserve the primacy of collective interests over corporatist ones from offending industries, and their accomplices among the political class.

The entire Mégantic series will be reproduced in a catalogue published in the fall of 2014 by VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie, in Québec.

The Joseph Plaskett Foundation is pleased to announce that Julie Trudel has been selected as the winner of the $25,000 Joseph Plaskett Award for this year.

In the tenth year of this Award for an outstanding painter to work in Europe, the Plaskett Foundation wishes to congratulate Julie Trudel who received her MFA from University of Quebec at Montréal (UQAM) in 2012. We wish to also thank the expertise of this year’s Jury which was based in Vancouver with senior artist’s Renée Van Halm, Robert Youds and Ben Reeves, in a process coordinated by Landon Mackenzie on behalf of the Foundation and the RCA.

The jury writes: “Julie Trudel was chosen for her intense and innovative approach to abstraction in painting. In her painting she investigates mechanical colour reproduction systems that she manually applies to variously shaped panels. This results in highly evocative and illusionistic surfaces that remind one of weavings or microscopic photography.”

Julie Trudel was formally presented with her Award at the Joseph Plaskett Reception on Saturday June 8, 2013 at the Empress Hotel in Victoria at the Annual General Assembly of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts now in its 133rd year. She plans to use her award to base herself for a year in Berlin, in 2014. Her work is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.